The power of cross team collaborations & the story behind Meesho’s recent win at the MMA Smarties 2019
At Meesho we strongly believe in cross team collaboration to achieve common goals. And when the goal is to reach out to and acquire more users (resellers) on our platform and make them successful, pooling together a diverse range of skills and talent across the board is a common practice at Meesho.
And proving that cross team collaborations do end up in successes, was when the Marketing and Branding teams at Meesho won top honours (5 awards) at the MMA Smarties India 2019 awards recently, Held in Mumbai, the awards night was organised by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) APAC region, a global non profit marketing trade association. The MMA brings together an ecosystem of marketers (especially mobile marketers), tech providers, and sellers working together towards the future of marketing.
Hear it from Sudhanshu Shekhar, our GM & VP Growth!
Along with the campaign — When Women Joined Hands To Break Social Shackles — the award proved to be a recognition of brand Meesho by the industry. The campaign helped deliver the important task of taking that value proposition created by Meesho and giving it visibility.
Our advertising partner in this case was Affle, a technology company that not only helps Meesho reach its target audience but also takes its value proposition to a newer audience who might benefit from the Meesho app too. The campaign was submitted under nominations in the form of a case study — When Women Joined Hands To Break Social Shackles (a broad campaign about women helping each other to progress) — by Affle and it had been running the campaign in partnership with Meesho for a year.
The Big Switch
In 2018, the Marketing team at Meesho realised that its audience now preferred to consume content in a video format (much like the global video content consumption trend) rather than still, image ads. India too was beginning to consume video content on its smartphones, thanks to falling data prices. Once we started experimenting with video ads, we immediately tasted some success. We realised that our audience was eager to consume content in this format, and more so in regional Indian languages.
There are certain principles involved around creating digital advertising though. A digital ad is very different from a TV commercial. In a digital format, the audience is easily distracted, whereas in television you have much more of a captive audience who generally do not skip ads.
The Marketing team at Meesho wanted to try out a video format and see the impact of it.
Over a month, the team collaborated with Branding to push forward this campaign in several Indian languages. We then brainstormed with the head of branding Malvika Tegta to come up with multiple concepts. She had done a brand survey among resellers previously, and we took lessons from it to figure out our core proposition. For instance, those who use the Meesho platform, how much do they connect to the brand? What is it that they think when they think about Meesho? And what is their number one reason to use the app?
And through the video format we now needed to take these value propositions to a newer set of people.
The branding team thought of multiple concepts, wrote scripts around them, did storyboarding, shot the videos and then finally did editing, which was a major chunk of the work. This end-to-end execution took about a month. The format we chose to use were 15 second slide videos with certain live aspects to them. What we were solving for was the “How” and “Why” — how can you become an entrepreneur on the Meesho platform with zero investment and earn through it. We ran these ads on Facebook and YouTube along with affiliate marketing partners such as Affle.
Through the campaign video series, the following significant insights were presented:
- Establishing a sense of identity for our resellers (mostly women and homemakers)
- The convenience of working from home
- Earning money and contributing to the overall household income
Running this campaign was one of the most business impactful steps for us.
The impact was immediately measurable because social platforms such as Google and Facebook are very performance marketing driven. We managed to acquire a sizeable number of new users through the campaign and it ended with social proof. This then became a framework for the rest of our video campaigns — going forward.
Company > Team >Individual
At Meesho, we always put team over individual and company over team. This is also one of our core values. Creating and running this campaign at scale was a massive exercise in demonstrating this value because we had to pull together resources across teams, utilise their talents, and execute an end-to-end video series.
We ran 7 videos in 8 languages and in three formats in every language — in portrait and landscape (for mobiles) and square for Instagram. A massive effort at scale and that couldn’t have been possible without teamwork. We released the campaign in August 2018 and worked through the month in collaboration with Branding in releasing weekly these videos.
Demonstrating the Company > Team> Individual value, team Meesho displayed the perfect example of two individual teams coming together to create real business impact by becoming focused on one single project. We also moved fast — from conceptualisation to the final release and shipped the campaign at speed. And this resulted in the impact being massive.
The When Women Joined Hands To Break Social Shackles brand campaign has raised the bar for us since then, and we are really happy that the team efforts of Marketing and Branding were recognised by the MMA with not one but five awards in categories such as Lead Generation/Direct Response/Conversion (Gold), Product/Services Launch (Gold), Mobile App Advertising (Gold) and industry awards such as Best in Show and Category awards (Silver). And winning the Brand of the Year was the icing on the cake!
Want to join team Meesho and help create 20 million entrepreneurs in 2020? Then we are hiring across roles. Apply here.
